It’s American Gaming Association President Bill Miller’s job to be upbeat about the prospects for the industry he spearheads in Washington, D.C.
However, he had good reason to sound upbeat at his annual “State of the Industry” webinar, delivered February 19.
The United States casino/iGaming/sports betting industry is riding a record high, coming off a year in which it saw $72 billion in revenue. That’s 7.5 percent growth from 2023. It also doesn’t include the winnings of tribal casinos, who have not yet reported their numbers.
Image: Bill Miller, President & CEO of American Gaming Association
That $72 billion, according to AGA Vice President of Research Dan Forman, included almost $14 billion from sports betting and $8.1 billion from iGaming. An accompanying graph showed a steady climb of revenue from 2014 to the present, Covid-plagued 2020 excepted.
“By all accounts, 2024 continues to tell a positive story,” Miller arguably understated. Gambling, he reported, had proven resilient against macroeconomic headwinds, “further evidence of public support for our industry. We take none of this success for granted.”
Indeed, Miller dwelt (not unjustifiably) on the menace of the underground and offshore gambling markets. “We’re engaging a constant battle against illegal gaming,” he said. In contrast to the sub rosa activities of those scofflaw operators, “Our industry walks through the front door in our communities.”
Image: Donald Trump, 45th and 47th US President
U.S. gaming, Miller said, welcomes regulatory oversight and sophisticated monitoring systems. He railed against “so-called skill game machines,” black- and gray-market slots that dot the American landscape, paying no taxes and subject to no regulation. These have been a particular bane in Missouri, Pennsylvania and Virginia, where they have cut into legal operators’ revenues.
Image: Las Vegas Strip
Battling Urban Mythology
Other objects of Miller’s wrath were currency exchanges and digital sweepstakes, the latter a very hot-button topic in his industry. He estimated that $73 billion had been lost in revenue to those and to offshore operators who are not subject to U.S. laws.
Image: Merrick Garland, US Attorney General
Legalized gambling, by contrast, engendered $15.5 billion in taxes to federal, state and local governments in 2024. Above and beyond that are the industry’s charitable efforts. Miller cited the Seminole Tribe, which provided $3 million in hurricane relief, and DraftKings’ donation of $2.5 million for technical education of veterans. He also pointed to International Game Technology’s creation of After School Advantage.
“Needless to say, the illegal market offers none of these benefits,” Miller declared. Deeming bipartisanship essential to progress, Miller said educating the new Congress is a top priority. Bemoaning what he considered misguided and ill-informed legislation predicated on urban myths, he said, “political leaders still labor under such misconceptions.”
Image: Guy Reschenthaler, U.S. Representative
President Trump’s visit to Circa Resort in downtown Las Vegas, where he became the first sitting president to shoot craps, was sufficient to bring laurels from the AGA president. He enthused that Trump’s dice dealings were “a testament to our positive role in the economy.” Miller also groused a bit about recently departed Attorney General Merrick Garland. “We were frustrated with the lack of action in the attorney general’s office previously,” he said grimly. He added that he hoped the Trump administration would treat gaming on the same, equal footing as other industries, citing the previous Trump White House’s inclusion of casinos in the CARES Act.
Image: Atlantic City
In his relationship with the new administration, Miller said his priorities would include heightened enforcement against illegal gambling, as well as raising the tax threshold on slot jackpots. It has been stuck at $1,600 for decades. He also lauded the efforts of Reps. Dina Titus and Guy Reschenthaler to lift the federal excise tax on sports betting.
“It’s bad policy that dates back to the Fifties,” Miller opined of that tax. Sen. Richard Blumenthal has lobbied for it to be used to treat gambling addiction under his GRIT Act, recently reintroduced in Congress.
Miller, however, called for the impost to be repealed, not repurposed.
Image: Dina Titus, U.S. Representative
Clouds in their Coffee
There were some clouds on the AGA’s horizon. Forman allowed that revenues have been in a slow decline in late 2024. Compared to 2023, Las Vegas is down 4.4 percent and Atlantic City two percent.
No such adversity was reported for Chicago or Washington, D.C., gaming’s third- and fourth-largest markets respectively.
There was also some notable movement. While the Las Vegas Strip struggled, possibly a victim of its high prices, downtown Las Vegas leapt from seventeenth place nationally to thirteenth, while Reno climbed from thirteenth to eleventh.
Led by New Jersey, Michigan and Pennsylvania, iGaming was said to be setting new records. “We’ve had incredible growth in the last three years,” Forman said, cautioning that “growth is [now] harder to come by.” Still, 30 percent of industry revenue is now digitally derived. The brick-and-mortar players, too, are getting younger and younger.
For the first time, the AGA included the Indian Gaming Association and the Association of Gaming Equipment Manufacturers in its roundup. Speaking for the IGA, Executive Director Jason Giles passionately made the point that all tribal-gaming revenues are returned or reinvested in IGA’s indigenous constituency.
“Indian gaming has become the economic engine,”
Giles said, adding that “This transition has neither been fair or equitable,” unevenly spread across the United States’ 574 sovereign Native American nations Giles pointed out that the monies derived from gambling go toward hospitals and schools, among other things, but are heavily taxed into the bargain.
Between the federal government, the states and localities, Giles reckoned that his industry was paying back $12 billion a year. The IGA boss praised the Joseph Biden administration’s Infrastructure Act for bringing upgrades to reservations across the country. He said he expected more jurisdictions to open to tribal gaming and for artificial intelligence to reshape casino floors, although he offered no specifics on that tantalizing prospect.
Playing Rope-a-dope
Windy generalities were the order of the day from AGEM’s Daron Dorsey. He said 2024 had been a year of growth despite “delays and disruptions” vaguely attributed to local politics. It had also been a year of mergers and acquisitions, with more such activity to come in 2025.
Dorsey was the only speaker to address the elephant in the room: tariffs. He said AGEM was studying the issue,along with trade policies at home and abroad with an eye toward their implications for his constituents. He noted that game components cross borderlines, “sometimes many times” and hinted that trade wars would impact gaming markets and suppliers. (They’ve already blindsided iGaming provider Rush Street Interactive, walloped with a 19 percent value added tax in Colombia.)
Like Miller and, to some extent, Giles, Dorsey was hopeful of new-market opportunities in the U.S. His wish list for the nascent year also included modernized regulation and the elimination of illegal actors.
Miller, Forman and lobbyist Chris Cylke then adjourned to a virtual press room for a questionand-answer session with the assembled media.
Questions were many, answers rather fewer. Miller’s responses tended toward the evasive and noncommittal, making one wonder why the press conference had been called in the first place.
The one issue on which Miller would be drawn out of his shell was the incursion into sports betting of prediction markets, flush off their success during the U.S. presidential election. It is a phenomenon of some concern to legacy sports betting operators, who operate on a state-by-state basis, while prediction markets were taking Super Bowl bets nationwide, with scant federal regulation.
“It’s clearly something that’s of great concern to us,” Miller said of Kalshi (newly advised by Donald Trump Jr.) and its ilk. He said he was following federal actions on this front and would submit comments to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission shortly.
Image: Circa Resort & Casino Las Vegas
He observed that state-wide sports betting supported 5,000 regulators and “significant tax revenues.” Miller allowed that he was very fretful of the rise of the prediction markets and that the existing sports wagering industry “could all be washed away.” Noting that prediction markets transcend state governance, he said sports betting oversight shouldn’t be done at the federal level. Indeed, the Supreme Court had scotched that very thing when it overturned the Bradley Act (PASPA) in 2018.
The Taxman Cometh
The AGA prexy also seemed somewhat in denial about the prospect for state-level increases in gaming taxes, especially in light of steep federal budget cuts currently taking place. One such levy was recently fended off in Louisiana and another one is being pushed in Ohio. Even so, Miller insisted, “It’s still a little bit early.
“We follow closely the trends at the state level,” Miller insisted, evading the question by saying, “It’s incumbent to tell our story.” He did caution against the baneful effects of tax increases on gaming’s ability to invest locally, saying, “This didn’t happen in a vacuum.”
Image: Reno
Left unmentioned was the prospect of gambling expansion made possible by states’ thirst for revenue. Budget desperation could open new states to iGaming, to casinos and even, in California, to tribal sports betting. As Miller would say, it’s early …yet.
Asked how to crack down on his bete noir, the illegal operator, Miller replied, “We’re not the arbiter of legality but we have raised the question with regulators across the country.”
One such illegal bookie is right at home, soonto- sentenced felon Mathew Bowyer. Miller’s opinion was sought on how hard the book should be thrown at Bowyer. He ducked the question but stressed the need for deterrence “so we can keep the integrity of the sports that are bet on.”
Staying with sports wagering, the topic of the latest NFL season could not be avoided. Sports books had a very bad football season. Just how bad? Forman allayed concerns, observing that hold by books was becoming progressively tighter. It had been around five percent when wagering was effectively confined to Nevada. Now it averages between nine and 10 percent.
Image: Richard Blumenthal, U.S. Senator
Perhaps the most intriguing question posed to Miller concerned the increasing prevalence of iGaming vis-a-vis brick-and-mortar casinos. Is this a good or a bad thing? Is it an inexorable trend? “It’s certainly a hot topic,” Miller said, refusing to commit himself. The AGA CEO noted the iGaming was expanding much more slowly than sports betting, largely due to those very fears that it would cannibalize terrestrial casinos:
“Legislatures are proceeding with caution, as is appropriate.”
Where the AGA is concerned, caution is ever the watchword.
***This exclusive feature interview was originally published in Casino Life Magazines February 2025 edition Issue 174 **
